#casaments

There are wedding traditions, but generally there aren't dresses only for wedding.

Wedding dress

In the last century, people have started coping what they see in movies and magazines from the USA (white dress for the woman). But this is quite recent, all the photos I've seen from when my parents and aunts and uncles got marries (1980s) and my grandparents (1950s) no woman would wear a white dress, simply a dress considered elegant at the time, and often it was a black dress. However, the upper class had adopted the white dress earlier, even since the 1910s!

Here's some historical photos, you'll see the difference between social classes and the urban/rural divide.

Aristocratic wedding in Ciutadella (Menorca, Balearic Islands), year 1913. Source: Menorca, imatges d'en Primer.

Ordinary people's wedding photos, all from Menorca (Balearic Islands). Left: wedding couple from Menorca, c. 1899. Source. | Middle: Antònia Carreras and her husband on their wedding day. Menorca, exact date unknown. Source. | Left: Menorcan couple on the day of their wedding, 1920s. Source.

Wedding photos from Barcelona (Catalonia). Left: bourgeois couple getting married in 1921. | Middle: couple getting married c. 1930. The family mentions that the seamstress recommended the bride to wear a short dress so she wouldn't look taller than her husband. | Right: couple getting married in 1946. | The three photos were uploaded by the families to the digital archive of their neighbourhood in Finestres de la Memòria (link to the "wedding photos" category of the project here).

Rural-style wedding. Terrassa (Catalonia), c. 1930. Source: Terrassa city archive.

Left: Wedded couple and guests right after the wedding. València (Valencian Country), 1906. Source. | Middle and left: wedding couples in c. 1920 and 1932, respectively, from Moncada (Valencian Country). Source: Moncadapèdia (on the link you'll see many more historical wedding photos from this town, including white dressed ones).

So I don't think we had wedding dresses that looked a distinct way only for weddings (historically, most people here have been rather poor, so they would not hace a dress that can only be worn once in a lifetime, instead this dress could be worn again later in very elegant occasions).

To see what clothes in a wedding could look like in different moments in time, here's two historical reenactments of weddings.

Here's a historical reenactment society from Northern Catalonia recreate a wedding in High Cerdanya (Northern Catalonia) in the year 1830:

And in the city of Ripoll (Comarques Gironines, Catalonia), every year they have a wool fair where they recreate a traditional wedding of the wealthy farmers. You can see some clips of it here:

As context for the 1st video, towards the beginning they're showing the bride's chest with the dowry*. And if you wonder what that weird-looking glass bottle is, I've explained what almorratxes are in the post linked here.

The dowry and bride chests

*Historically, dowries have been very important around of Europe. Since the Middle Ages and until the late 20th century, women were expected to bring a dowry, which would be larger or smaller, more expensive or cheaper, depending on social class. Dowries would include money (dot) and an aixovar, which was a collection of bed sheets, table clothes, and other clothing and objects that the woman brought to the household. It was often kept inside a bride chest, which was a piece of furniture that was often beautifully decorated and passed down from mother to daughter. In fact, bride chests are considered one of the most characteristic pieces of furniture in Catalan culture for many centuries. I talked about bride chests a bit more here:

Dowries were a discriminatory practise, historically there were some weddings that were stopped because the woman's family didn't have enough money for a dowry considered good enough. But the material part of it is very useful, because new households need these items, so it's good if the newly-weds bring them. Back in the day, girls usually sewed or embroidered their bedsheets in their adolescent years, before even being asked for marriage. My mother (born in the 1960s) told me that it always saddened her when she was a young girl that when it was a saint day or birthday, the boys would get toys but she and the other girls would only get bed sheets and similar things for their dowry.

Music

Another tradition was singing, but this one has become almost lost in the last 50 years or so. Depending on the area, you could find the majorales del Roser (women who sang songs and improvized personalized lyrics while playing the tambourine, I've explained it in more detail in this post), or they would sing albades/aubades songs with the guitarró (similar to ukelele)... but the majorales del Roser don't exist anymore, and the aubades are considered very old-fashioned. I have a family friend who is a music teacher and he had aubades in his wedding (many years ago), and he told us that when he told his friends and family that they would have aubades in the wedding, everyone was like "uhh are you sure?" and thinking it was a weird thing to do, but when they did it everyone liked it lol.

There is also a specific dance that was often done in weddings, but I'm not finding videos online. My cousin's husband was part of a folk dance group (esbart) for many years, so they performed this dance at their wedding. It was a slow dance for 2 people, but I don't know how to explain it in more detail.

Where to wear the wedding ring

A noticeable difference between Catalan married people and married people from other places is that Catalans wear the wedding ring on the left hand (like in France) while others like Spanish and German people wear it on the right hand.

The ceremony

In general I think the rest of the wedding is the same as in other Western European countries: first there's the ceremony (where friends and/or relatives of the marrying couple give a little speech dedicated to their good future, read a poem or a song..., then some person --usually the mayor, a peace judge, or a priest-- marries them), then all the guests go out quicker than the couple to be ready to throw rice (or sometimes rose petals) on the wedded couple as they exit the venue, then everyone goes to the party place where there will be a large meal, ending with a big cake, the couple gives presents to the parents and a few special friends, and there's a lot of music and dancing.

Also, the overwhelming majority of wedding nowadays are civil and not religious (the official government data shows that in 2024 there were 27,836 weddings in Catalonia, out of which 25,394 were exclusively civil, and only 2,402 were Catholic, and 40 for other religions).

Ah, and we don't have stag/bachelor's party. Sadly we've been getting a lot of tourism from UK and USA who come do their bachelor's parties here, because they want to be disrespectful in ways they wouldn't do in their country, and they think we are less civilized or more allowing. They misbehave and harass people on the streets with sexual objects. Luckily, some cities in Catalonia have now forbidden this kind of behaviour, but it's a shame it has to be done with a law forbidding certain behaviours and not just out of respect for public spaces and other people. I really hope these sexist and disrespectful tradition never takes root here, but considering how much influence we get from the USA, you can never know.

This is what I could think of! I hope it was useful to answer your question.